HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Video Card Review

PAGE INDEX

Power Consumption and Temperatures

Video Card Power Consumption

For power consumption tests, Benchmark Reviews utilizes an 80-Plus Gold rated Corsair HX750w (model: CMPSU-750HX). This power supply unit has been tested to provide over 90% typical efficiency by Ecos Plug Load Solutions. To measure isolated video card power consumption, I used the energenie ENER007 power meter made by Sandal Plc (UK).

A baseline test is taken without a video card installed inside our test computer system, which is allowed to boot into Windows-7 and rest idle at the desktop before power consumption is recorded. Once the baseline reading has been taken, the graphics card is installed and the system is again booted into Windows and left idle at the desktop. Our final loaded power consumption reading is taken with the video card running a stress test using FurMark. Below is a table with the isolated video card power consumption (not system total) displayed in Watts for each specified test product. The HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost 2GB video card requires 2x 6-pin power connectors from your PSU. The power consumption results discussed below are absolute maximum values, and not representative of real-world performance.

Power Consumption

Power State

Power Consumption (watts)

Idle Desktop (no video card)

45w

Idle Desktop

12w (57-45)

FurMark Load (extreme burn-in)

260w (305-45)

Video Card Temperatures

Benchmark tests are always nice, so long as you care about comparing one product to another. But when you’re an overclocker, gamer, or merely a PC hardware enthusiast who likes to tweak things on occasion, there’s no substitute for good information. Benchmark Reviews has a very popular guide written on Overclocking Video Cards, which gives detailed instruction on how to tweak a graphics cards for better performance. Of course, not every video card has overclocking head room. Some products run so hot that they can’t suffer any higher temperatures than they already do. This is why we measure the operating temperature of the video card products we test.

To begin my testing, I use GPU-Z to measure the temperature at idle as reported by the GPU. Next I use FurMark’s “Burn In test” (with extreme burn-in enabled) to generate maximum thermal load and record GPU temperatures at high-power 3D mode. The ambient room temperature is also measured throughout testing. FurMark does two things extremely well: drive the thermal output of any graphics processor higher than applications of video games realistically could, and it does so with consistency every time. Furmark works great for testing the stability of a GPU as the temperature rises to the highest possible output. The temperatures discussed below are absolute maximum values, and not representative of real-world performance.

Ambient temperature 24°C

Fan Speed

Temperature °C

Noise level /10

Idle

20%

29

1/10

Load

45%

81

3/10

Load

100%

78

8/10

Overclocking

The HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost 2GB video card ships with a very high factory overclock out of the box and there really is very little overclocking headroom remaining. HIS have pushed this model to the limits of its capabilities and I could only pry out 20MHz extra core clock and 50MHz extra memory clock. These overclocks really didn’t do much to improve the benchmark results so they were disregarded. Temperatures and power consumption are also high enough with the factory overclock already without trying to squeeze out more performance.

That’s all of the testing over, in the next section I will deliver my final thoughts and conclusion.